Greg Gifford: Building Apps for Salesforce, Cursory Knowledge and SFMC Challenges

AL: All right. So you can in that way.

GG: Yeah.

AL: Okay. And so ExactTarget has changed a lot from what I can tell since its acquisition. So what are the major things that you feel have changed over the years?

GG: I think the major changes have been that it’s focused outside of e-mail marketing. That is probably the biggest thing. They’ve made it a multi-medium platform where it’ll handle all aspects of marketing, not just e-mail marketing. I think that is probably one of the largest changes that they’ve done. There have been some changes as far as, you know, I’m sure there have been grumblings with people, but like, the support and service around that has altered, I don’t think it’s necessarily as bad as people make it. But yeah, there, there have been changes to the way that they handle that aspect of the business.

AL: For sure. And I think here it’s also interesting to note that it might be very different between regions I’m based in Europe where ExactTarget was less prolific at the start of the acquisition. So we always have this context. But when, you know, visit the head office in Chicago, for a partner conference, you do hear the stories of course.

GG: Yeah. And another aspect to you just made a great point is that Maria was global whereas ExactTarget was a bit smaller. So, I mean it’s easier to have personal support when there are fewer people. So like that was probably a major influence as well to the difference there.

AL: And it seems there used to be a lot more professional services from the side of ExactTarget where now they’ve made sure that the platform is more enabled towards consultants to do the implementation.

GG: Yeah, absolutely.

AL: So, you know, seeing how the modules have expanded over the years. What, aspect of Marketing Cloud do you enjoy the most?

GG: My favorite thing inside of Marketing Cloud is that pretty much with a bit of duct tape and bubble gum, you can make the system do pretty much anything you want. I mean within reason like you can’t clone someone in Marketing Cloud. But like almost any aspect of technical marketing you can accomplish in the platform, that being said just because you can, doesn’t mean you should always, but having the ability to do it is a great thing. It kind of almost retains, that like Wild West field. That was and still to some extent is e-mail marketing in the early 2000s. So I, it’s being able to have a platform that inside of the platform, you can automate the ingestion of data, have it go then to where it automatically segment it out and then create e-mail send definitions so you can have it where all you do is you drop a file to an FTP and it’ll do all the rest. Having a system that is able to do that in a platform without any middleware or outside integrations is huge. I think that power is unmatched in other platforms right now.

AL: Yes, I do believe that’s true. The technical capabilities of the platform are pretty immense. But of course, now, and now you sparked my curiosity, what’s like what’s been the most challenging or crazy thing you’ve built?

GG: Most challenging one. All right. So that I would say is something I actually caused to myself like, I decided to make this and what it was almost an automation dashboard to replace Automation Studio.

AL: Wow. Okay.

GG: The, reason behind it was that especially in the agency life, you’re monitoring tons of clients like your support team or, you know, the campaign management team is looking at tons of clients. So having to log in, go to the Automation dashboard, scroll through there to find the relevant material and then log out and log into the next one. It’s a huge step. So, what I was looking to do is create something that would be able to iterate through the different business units of different clients to be able to view it all in a single place and in a quicker way because I would have all their relevant necessary information in one screen instead of having to potentially click around. Now, that comes with a lot of issues along the lines of… yeah, along the lines first off security. So being able to make sure that no one that’s not supposed to be on there is not on, there is a monumental task in itself. So there was a lot of building around that, I unfortunately can’t share a lot of what I did because, I don’t want to, you know, give way to the secret sauce for that platform which is running. So, I don’t want to, you know, tell you how to break into it, but.

AL: We’ve been through a security review ourselves at DESelect. So I can sort of imagine the different steps you have to take and how to set up the authentication. It is, you know, it’s super important, but.

GG: Absolutely.

AL: A bit of work.

GG: Yeah. And then from there, I had to try and figure out how to get the actual information out of Marketing Cloud onto this platform. And, it was an adventure to go through because the soap objects that we use are black luster for automation like there is information there. But the relevant stuff like say, last run date, next run, the schedule, all that isn’t easily accessible. And in order to get it, you have to go through two or three calls for each automation which when you have hundreds if not thousands of automation, is quite a task. So I started exploring rest and there are no documented endpoints on rest for Automation Studio, but there are some undocumented ones. And through a bit of exploration there, I found the ones that I needed to be able to get it up and running. Of course, it was running. But then when there was any volume, it kind of fell over or it would take, you know, eight seconds, nine seconds. At which point it’s like, well, it’s you know, it’s good. But it’s running so slow. It might not be worth the effort. So I had to try and figure out how to work around that. I wound up going to where I would create a process in the background that would constantly be running, updating a JSON object inside of either like a content block or a code snippet that it would then draw off for the platform would draw off of that. So it’s not necessarily real-time but it’s as close to real-time as you can get. And it runs in, you know, one or two seconds instead of 8,9,10, or time out.

AL: Absolutely. I mean, I find this super interesting. I’m a bit hesitant, to dive too deep because I pose the risk of scaring away some of our ads, but at the risk of maybe giving away a bit of our own secret as we also worked with the automation studio API. But for our purposes, we made a design decision to step away from it because exactly some of its aspects are a bit of a black box, it’s less so for activities we noticed. So we’re just gonna build that whole automation ourselves.

GG: Yeah. That’s one thing I always share too with everyone when you dive into the document endpoints, it’s a using-your-own-risk thing and there is no guarantee of notice when they change anything on it now. Yeah. Like, so like building something to be used, future-facing or used inside of major operations is a potential for disaster because it could like you could break your entire setup and you don’t know how you don’t know when like it’s just gonna be a huge task to try and fix it if it’s even possible to fix it. So like that’s one thing I always say like this was internal, so I felt comfortable using them but yeah, I was building this for a client or, you know, for something like that, it probably would not be possible with, the internal, I’m sorry, the undocumented.

AL: I get now a little bit of a different topic because there’s no way around it. 2020 has been a challenging year for pretty much the whole planet. So I was curious what are the biggest challenges that you face today? Doing SFMC projects or supporting clients?

GG: Yeah. Probably one of the greatest challenges is… I would say dealing with the fact that everything is changing like there, there is no set path there. There is no… precedent for it. So now all of a sudden I’m at home, my wife is at home, my son is at home and we need to figure out how to allow all of us to be able to do what we do, whether it’s remote learning, whether it’s working remotely, whatever we need to do, and dealing with that. And then also having the aspect of because of all these shifts, there’s a lot of different processes that were involved that are no longer capable of being done like, they have to be completely changed like even something as simple as going to the supermarket, there, there was a time for a bit that we couldn’t go out and do food shopping. We had to do order from home or, you know, things like that. And then inside of the work aspect, there were tons of times that there would be collaboration, in the office whether it was through meetings or working sessions and all that. That. Now we had to try and do virtually that I personally have always been a remote employee with DEG, but it can greatly affect a lot of, the outside processes that people were doing in the office too. Like, so that effect then affects me as well. So like it’s been… a challenge because like long story short, everything is changing.

AL: Got it. But, you do seem to mostly list personal aspects in terms of impact.

GG: Yeah. I think the major reason for that is because I was already a remote person. So a lot of the changes were more of that people were coming into my environment. I’m having to adjust to being outside. So like that’s probably why I would list that more than anything. I mean at DEG. We were kinda lucky like we didn’t have to worry about, any staff cuts or anything. And, I got to say a huge shot out to, the higher-ups in the company who were willing to take a cut to be able to ensure that happens. So, I mean, there there was a lot of changes but it wasn’t as bad as it’s been with other people. So, I do want to give that shout-out to the company.

AL: Fantastic. And I’m sure they’ll hear it. Thanks for that. Given though that you’re pretty much an expert home worker if I can call it that way. Other things that because many of the viewers are probably doing this for the first time to this extent. So are the tips or tricks you could share with them to stay motivated as they work from home.

GG: Sure. I would say probably, the best tip is that you should get your separate little office space in your house or wherever you’re working and have that be your workspace. I would recommend doing the same with your wife, roommate, friends, or whoever you live with, have them have their own space separate. Because if you’re working together at the same time, you’re gonna get on each other’s nerves. And then once you’re off work, you don’t have to deal with those same issues outside of work. So like it’s gonna be straining on you and all of your relationships there. So that will probably be my biggest tip. Second, I’d recommend doing work-life balance goals for instance, my newest one is to take about five minutes every hour and just do some sort of calisthenics or activity to like push up sit-ups, squats, things like that just to keep the blood flowing to take a break away from, you know, that because most of this type of work is all mental. So like I’m not really doing something. So being able to take your mind a five-minute break every hour is a great thing.

AL: If I may jump in here, I think that that’s probably true anyway, even if you work at the office, but hopefully now people realize this more than before and, this could be a positive change in the long run.

GG: Yeah, I definitely hope so. I mean, it also allows like sitting for eight hours, nine hours, 10 hours. It really adversely affects your body. And just that little bit of movement can remove a lot of those different aches and pains and allow you to have better concentration. I would say outside of those, the other thing I can recommend is a cafe, lots and lots of caffeine.

AL: I will note that down… going back to the more technical aspect of Marketing Cloud, you know, you have a very extensive experience here. But what recent features of SFMC are you excited about?

GG: I would say the most recent feature is probably the transactional journeys because I’ve always been a huge fan of the transactional API, but there are a lot of people and a lot of clients and businesses that are very hesitant to do that because when it was built, it was built to be almost hosted outside of the platform where all of the calls, all the analytics, and everything was done in a third party service. I was just making calls into Marketing Cloud. So to a lot of people, it was like completely rebuilding and restructuring their existing triggers and definitions set up in Marketing Cloud, there was a lot of resistance there with the transactional journey. It allows you a user interface to help handle a lot of that stuff and relieve the giant process of changing it all. So like it’s been a God sent in different ways because honestly, the transactional aspects of the messages are much more efficient than the triggered sense. So it’s definitely the way of the future. I know there are a ton of other awesome things that have popped out especially around Journey Builder lately, but I just chose that one because it has the biggest impact, to me and, my work.

AL: Yeah, I can imagine. And there’s one interesting thing here that I would say that, the triggered sense and so on all the custom that was typically something that at least I would see happen more often in the big enterprise as opposed to a smaller company. So this may democratize its feature a bit.

GG: Yeah, I absolutely 100 percent agree.

AL: Great. Now, still, in this topic, do you think that all marketers should be technical marketers to some extent? Because you know, taking full advantage of the platform, even API sides, it does imply that you may need to know, you may need to know SQL?

GG: I love this question and hate the same because I always want to say yes, but it’s a very unrealistic and unfair point of view, like it’s something that like it’s almost because I do this every day. I want it to be important to everyone which isn’t the case. Like there, there should be to an extent some shared knowledge of the platform and cross-training in different areas. But like the whole goal of a marketing team is specialization, like, the strategist has no reason to know, AMPScript. Like there’s not gonna be value there for them to know it like sort of like how there’s, the database, people shouldn’t know it like, they should know their specific section and that’s it like it’s cursory knowledge is necessary to be able to understand the limitations of the platform. But the in-depth, technical knowledge is not always a requirement for effective usage.

AL: I like how you used the phrase cursory knowledge. There was an ID for a while about T, shaped people like the letter T, where you know, a marketer should have cursory knowledge of different domains, but then specialize in one. Though. To what extent, do you think that still holds true? And, do marketers for instance, your strategic marketer, in your example, would they have cursory knowledge of Marketing Cloud at all?

GG: I think, they should have the ability to know what the platform can do in order to be able to create a strategy around utilization. And now, what is considered cursory knowledge, I think is dependent on the person’s role. Because again, like the cursory knowledge of the platform may be more specific to someone that handles the data like they don’t need to know how the emails are sent. They don’t need to know about different aspects of, you know, mobile push or anything like that. They’re more concerned about the analytics, the reporting data structures, that kind of stuff is where their cursory knowledge should be.

AL: Okay. That makes sense. Now, we’ve touched on different aspects of SFMC. Are the things that from your experience, you think that the people at Salesforce could still improve? Like is there something that really bothers you while working with the platform? You can’t wait for it to be fixed?

GG: So, I’m pretty sure they’re not going to like my answer on this, but documentation and transparency are my two biggest pet peeves right now. I mean there is a ton of information out there. It’s U, it’s not easy to access and it’s sometimes hard to understand it’s unfortunate when most of the best resources to help Marketing Cloud are not on the official documents like I.

AL: I was just, I was just gonna say this is this ties back to what we discussed earlier that, HowToSFMC your curated platform.

GG: Yeah, that’s exactly how it came around is that there was no, there was not the level of support too especially in the technical aspects of it that there should be almost. And I mean, there’s a lot to a through regarding different support and services that they are unable to share at the business level, which completely makes sense. But at the same time, there’s no transparency there on why they can’t share or what they can’t share, which gets frustrating because you’re talking to them and they can’t tell you anything. And you’re thinking well, these people don’t know it when it’s that, they literally are unable to tell you A, that they can’t tell you, and B what the actual answer is. So it’s a bit frustrating in different aspects around that as well.

AL: Absolutely. I think in my own experience, it’s very similar. And, mind you again, we’re based in Europe where they didn’t have this professional services structure. And in the early days, I mean, I’m talking early days after acquisition, though not early days, ExactTarget. There were still a lot of components that required professional service to be set up. But not, everyone always realized that on any side.

GG: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That’s that’s a great point as well. The setup is something that they’ll tell you it can do this. It can do this. It can do this, but they won’t tell you that in order to do that, you have to do about 100 hours of development work to set it up to be able to do that.

AL: That’s where you come in.

GG: Yeah, exactly.

AL: Now, one of the great things I think about Salesforce is how open it’s ecosystem is. The AppExchange is the largest B2B app store in the world. And of course, solution providers like us, we DESelect, we can build apps on top of it. So, I’m curious, have you worked with any apps from the AppExchange?

GG: Yes, I’ve worked with a lot of like, the larger ones. I’ve worked like litmus return path, those kinds of things as well as a few custom ones. Whether I built it or it was an existing with that brand. It’s it’s amazing. Like, I agree that’s one of the best features. It goes back to what I was talking about before with duct tape and bubble gum. This is a bit like a professional version of that. It gives you a nice clean solution to pick up where Salesforce services or the platform out-of-the-box features kind of fall short. So, I, it’s amazing that they allow you, to build on top of their platform. Like, I absolutely agree. It’s it’s one of the best features there and it’s the experience of the integration. It is amazing. Like, it really is you plug it in and then you can use it.

AL: Right. It’s it’s wonderful. You mentioned you made custom apps. You mentioned the automation dashboard before. Of course, is there any other one that we should know about?

GG: As far as what I built, I’ve built more specific apps outside of, the automation one that you mentioned. And most of those like, I think a great example is on Susan’s blog that she has a great walkthrough on how to build a simple one. I believe her example is a data extension finder that, you just create it through a code snippet or a cloud page, and it is able to then integrate it into the system. And most of that kind of stuff is what I’ve built. I haven’t delved too deep down the rabbit hole there. Like for instance, I’d have something that would help create test data or help create repetitive segments, things like, that is more of what I would be building there than anything large.

AL: Well, I’m very glad you mentioned repetitive segments because it perfectly ties into my next question, know, as you probably know, at least we provide a drag-and-drop app to segment in SFMC. So what are of course, super interesting to know? What are the challenges with regard to segmentation specifically that you’ve and on?

GG: So, one of the largest challenges I would say is the 30-minute time out that SQL queries have like that that’s something that a lot of people don’t realize that honestly, the marketing platform, I’m sorry, the Marketing Cloud platform was not built to really handle a lot of those higher and segmentations and data manipulations. So like there’s a bit of that, the misunderstanding of what the platform should do compared to what it can do. And, I mean, your DESelect is a great way to help target them and set them to a specific… way to use the platform correctly. So that they are able to do it where it’s not, hey, I can build this crazy complex query and be able to do this awesome thing. And then it times out.

AL: All right, right.

GG: And then you have to figure out why it timed out is because I’m doing all this and I get it this way, it’s set out like, yes, you could do, these awesome custom segmentations through this way. And this way you can control so that it doesn’t get way out there to the level of, you know, they’re trying to segment 50,000,000 records through five or six different joins on relational data and creating it through all this in a single query.

AL: Exactly. And I think this is where you mentioned earlier that SMC is a crazy powerful platform from a technical point of view. But with great power comes great responsibility, right? So, so this is exactly that. I think this is one of the roles where solution providers like us can take the hand off the users and make sure they do it in the right way.

GG: Yeah, absolutely.

AL: Maybe just a few closing notes, you know, given all your experience, all the work you’ve done? What would you recommend to people just starting out with SFMC, What would be the attention points in a project?

GG: Well, I would definitely recommend reaching out to communities there like E-mail Geek, and Slack channel. There are a few SFMC specific on there and everyone there is very responsive and very considered and nice. It goes from all levels like there are times that I post what questions in there, there are times that I post answers, and not every question that I post is, the most well thought out like a high-end question. There are a lot of times that I’ll post something and that’s completely fine. Like that’s something that everyone does and everyone is understanding of. So like, don’t ever feel bad to put a question up there that, you know, people are going to attack you that same like there’s Stack Exchange, there’s tons of places like for instance on my blog or How To or many other the resource page. And I find that to be the best way to find new points of information, whether it’s like Adam Spriggs’s blog, Susanna, blog, Ivan’s blog, Elliott’s videos, like there’s tons of hidden gems that if you explore those resources pages, you’ll find, and that is probably the best way to get involved and get into different groups and communities. Like there’s, the Salesforce success groups. I think they’re called I’m not positive on what they’re their name yet, but there are those there’s like to look up answers, the technical marketers meet up, and teach me SFMC, which Salesforce is offering through gildehood there. And on top of that, there are all those blogs that you can look at and get different tips and information.

AL: That’s a great list of resources. So, you know, in spite of maybe a lack of documentation, as a concern, I think the community has definitely stepped in. Are there any lost thoughts or things you would like to share with our audience?

GG: I would just say… keep on trucking like it’s a tough thing to get into because there is no Dev environment. So really it’s you get knowledge through Trailhead, you can learn and read about it. But it’s difficult because the only way usually to get a job in marketing classes have experience in it. So it’s rough there. But if you keep going, if you look at things where there’s volunteer capabilities on different things which will get you exposure to it, and that will help you get in. So like just keep looking and keep at it and always explore every option just because it’s volunteer. Don’t throw it away. It can vastly help your career and provide value to you as well as to the actual place that you’re volunteering.

AL: Absolutely. Thank you Greg for sharing your story today, and for all the great advice. And, yeah, thanks.

GG: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure